From Scrivener to Dip Pen.

[Asura Levi]

Well, for quite some time now I had discovered my liking for writing.
It all started with a simple Word document (it actually with my mother typewriter many years ago when I was but a child, but I haven't realised it at the time).

For many unfinished stories, the Word was more than enough for me. Yet, as time passed, I found it restrictive. Every time I had go on a hiatus, short or long, or I would have to recall a character whose last appearance was several pages ago, I would have to go back in the document, searching for it. A very time consuming task, no, a very time wasting task.

To counter it I looked for solutions, software that had all this characters pages that were just a click away. And in the beginning it was good.
Time kept going and with it I change computers and operating systems (abandoning windows completely for linux). As we all know, softwares don't follow you like that. And to go back to a Word document wasn't enough for me. Even to keep notes in a separated document didn't really work.

My frustration just grew bigger and bigger. Year out year in, got a myself a mac, and the scrivener as well.
Plenty of features it has, you can do everything on it, really. It also happen you can actually write on it, but all those features, so distracting.

After all these years, what I once enjoyed become an annoyance. I didn't found happiness in writing anymore. Before I blamed it on not having tools good enough that would allow me to put my ideas down into paper fast enough.
It is not that I didn't knew what to write, I knew, I had loads of ideas. But after a initial draft, it became meaningless. I would have a plot hook that would seldom develop in anything.

Well, life goes on and I ordered a dip pen believing I was getting a fountain pen. True was frustrated at first but as it was what I had I just began to writing using it. Just because I fancy.
Not long after my first words with this kind of pen I was enjoying writing again. It is true the writing is slow, very slow since I have to stop after a couple of lines to dip it on ink.
But it turned out this slow process allowed my thoughts and ideas to mature. That second I lost dipping the pen become ten times more valuable as it would allow the next sentence to take shape.

So I wonder now, after writing all this neat backstory, anyone else had gone through any similar process? Avoiding better/advanced technology because it distracted you too much from the actual writing?
I do not writing only with the dip pen, I do quite a lot using the very limited TextEdit (notepad for mac). I don't need all those refinement to tell a story, especially since I'm writing just to myself. But I do not have more that urge of writing faster and faster.

 

[Scribble]

I always carry a notebook, and am forever scribbling in it on the train (hence my handle "Scribble"). Recently, I chose a notebook with no lines on the paper... this was to encourage me to draw more. I enjoy this, and it is hard to avoid doing things you enjoy.

That thinking pause while dipping ink is brilliant, I find it inspiring. When I was working on the laptop all the time, I found there was a kind of guilt/anxiety/icky feeling that begins when my fingers were NOT moving. Having a technologically-imposed pause with a necessary action, you have a moment to roll the words around in your mouth, see if they taste right, before you jot them down.

If you think about the famous works that were written by ink pens (Shakespeare?), you may be onto something there.

 

[Steerpike]

I have a fountain pen and a dip pen, both, and my first draft is by pen. Then I type it into Scrivener

 

[A. E. Lowan]

I write directly into Word, but I also write at speed of slug. Lines, sometimes entire paragraphs, will go through whole permutations in my head before I type, so by the time I actually type the sentence is in its third or fourth draft. Me writing physically looks like me sitting still for long moments, followed by a flurry of typing, and then another period of stillness.

Oh, and drinking coffee. There must be caffeine for this method to be effective.

 

[Penpilot]

When I started, I had a similar problem of constantly trying to find the right software to aid in my writing. I didn't make a whole lot of progress until I forgot about finding the right software and instead just started writing on what ever I had, which was Word. I found other tools to supplement word, Supernote Card, Wikipad, yWriter, etc. but eventually I settled in on Scrivener.

Here's what I found out about myself. Do I need Scrivener or any of those other programs to write? No. It's not the tools. It's what you do with them. Do the tools help? Yes they do, but right now if all those programs disappeared, I could make due.

 

[Asura Levi]

(...) When I was working on the laptop all the time, I found there was a kind of guilt/anxiety/icky feeling that begins when my fingers were NOT moving.(...)

You made me remember, when I was fixed on using different softwares, I would walk in circles in my room a lot before writing anything, just to stand and walk again a lot. Lol.

 

[stephenspower]

When it comes to fiction, I'm in the opposite boat. My Google Drive has changed my life. I can write anywhere--except in the tunnel into NYC on NJ Transit--using the same draft. No more shuffling a date Word doc from computer to computer via email. I do print out chapters in Word for line editing, but I input the changes using GDocs. I prefer to write on my laptop and revise/edit on my phone just because I can type more quickly on the former and am not distracted by hunting and pecking for letters. Only actual submissions now are made using Word (and those versions I save to my GDrive for later reuse).

I will say I still haven't figured out how to use GDocs in offline mode, which is incredibly frustrating, so on a recent trips I wrote in Word on my phone and later transferred everything to my GDrive.

Poetry, however, I still write with a pen on paper before transferring a day's work to the computer for further work, then printing it out for revision and continuation on the train.

 

[Caged Maiden]

I use and love Word. That being said, organization helps more than anything. If I make a spider graph in Word, for example, I put it into a folder sort that looks like this:

Documents:
Novels:
Warrior's Heart:
Planning:
Plot graph-1


So I think how you file your word docs is really important because if they're messy it feels like climbing a mountain whenever you need to search for something you know you wrote somewhere.

I tend to function best with simple tools and think I would get distracted by Scrivener. One reason is that I don't use note cards to organize my thoughts, I prefer to just use a Word chart, draw up a calendar or graph, and put it all in one place if I need it. I might have one that's a calendar of every event on its day (to keep my plot straight), or I might have a flow chart that begins with the climax and details every event till the end.

Either way, I didn't need an upgrade in tools. I needed to learn how to do everything I needed in Word.